Education Week - December 10, 2014 - 12

School and Housing Officials Tackle Student Mobility Issues
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
children's education through parentteacher
conferences and volunteering
at the school, and to work with
caseworkers on a plan to improve
the education and employment of
adults in the household.
In exchange, the families receive
vouchers to help cover the cost of
housing. In the first year of participation,
families covered $25 of their
rental costs per month, and the housing
authority covered the rest. The
families' financial obligations grow
gradually until they are self-sufficient:
The program covers 80 percent of rent
in the second year, 60 percent in the
third year, 40 percent in the fourth
year, and 20 percent in the fifth year.
For the Gantt family, that participation
has meant trading instability
for a four-bedroom townhouse
where they have lived for two years.
Caseworkers based in the school
helped Mr. Gantt, 33, previously a
short-order cook who served prison
time for drug-related charges before
meeting his wife, find scholarships
and grants to train for his commercial
driver's license. He recently finished
the training and is now weighing
job possibilities that pay $20 to
$40 an hour. And Mrs. Gantt, 32,
who stays home with the couple's
youngest children, is working on her
bachelor's degree online.
Their youngest child, Bella, is 1,
and their oldest, Alissa, is 13. They
currently have two children at McCarver,
but their other children have
also benefited from involvement in
the program, Mr. Gantt said.
Place-Based Approach
The housing program at McCarver
Elementary fits into the trend of
place-based approaches for helping
disadvantaged students, which also
includes Promise Neighborhoods, financed
through competitive federal
grants.
Such efforts differ from past interventions
for poor students, which
often focused on relocating individual
families to higher-income areas,
said Justin Milner, a senior research
associate with the Washingtonbased
Urban Institute.
But past experiments with moving
poor families to wealthier
neighborhoods showed mixed academic
results. And, as deep poverty
becomes more concentrated in both
urban and suburban areas, there's
a growing interest in broader approaches
that address the needs of
entire schools, Mr. Milner said.
The stress that high mobility creates
for one family is multiplied and
intensified in high-poverty schools,
where entire classrooms can turn
over during the course of an academic
year as parents move and
students shift in and out of schools.
Highly mobile students struggle to
learn concepts as they shift from
schools with different instructional
methods and teaching timelines,
and problems related to their poverty,
including hunger and family
turmoil, can make it hard for
them to be engaged in the classroom.
Even children who don't move freFROM
TOP:
The Gantt family says grace
before eating a snack at the
four-bedroom townhouse they
rent through the local housing
authority in Tacoma, Wash.
Jason Gantt, 5, kindergartner,
and Brooklyn Gantt, 3, run up
the stairs to play house at their
four bedroom townhouse they
acquired through a local
housing authority in Tacoma,
Wash.
quently often struggle academically
when most other students in their
school do, researchers have found.
Federal housing-assistance proA
STABLE HOME: Spend
more time with the
Gantt family in their
Tacoma, Wash.
townhouse.
www.edweek.org/
fullframe
grams, designed to stabilize families,
have a limited reach. Those programs,
including Section 8 housing
vouchers, typically target rental aid
to those earning less than 50 percent
of the area's median income. An estimated
19.3 million families were eligible
for the assistance in 2011, but
only 4.6 million received it, according
to a December 2013 report by the
Joint Center for Housing Studies at
Harvard University.
U.S. public schools reported a record
high enrollment of 1.3 million
homeless students in the 2012-13
school year, a nearly 8 percent increase
from the previous year.
Located in the hilltop area above
downtown Tacoma, McCarver Elementary
School enrolls large numbers
of students who live in homeless
and domestic-violence shelters
downtown, said Scott Rich, who was
the principal of the school when the
12 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 10, 2014 | www.edweek.org
housing pilot was created.
About a third of McCarver's 400
students were then classified, Mr.
Rich said. For most of the past decade,
the school's mobility rate exceeded
100 percent. It peaked at 179
percent in 2005-06, which means
the entire school population turned
over nearly twice that year.
"It was a revolving-door situation,"
said Mr. Rich, who is now a principal
at a middle school.
The Tacoma Housing Authority
worked with the school to design
the pilot and identify participant
families. The agency has a federal
Moving to Work designation, which
gives it the flexibility to design innovative
housing supports and to attach
strings, such as school requirements,
to its rental vouchers.
Gaining Support
To boost its appeal to families,
McCarver converted to an International
Baccalaureate Primary Years
Program site. That model emphasizes
learning a second language,
curiosity, and critical thinking.
The housing program, schoolbased
case managers, and annual
third-party analysis are supported
by a variety of local organizations
and through a grant from the Seattle-based
Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. (The foundation also
helps support Education Week's coverage
of implementation of collegeand
career-ready standards.)
An evaluation from the program's
second year shows that 45 of the 50
original families are still participating.
(Some have left for better job
opportunities elsewhere, and others
didn't meet the requirements.)
McCarver's mobility rate was 75
percent in 2012-13 and in 2013-14.
While that rate is still high, it's the
lowest the school has seen in at least a
decade, the report says. Median attendance
rates among participants have
risen to nearly meet the school's rate
of 96 percent, well exceeding attendance
rates for homeless students in
the district, which are in the mid 80s.
Analysis of state standardized-test
scores is difficult with such a small
cohort of students, evaluators wrote.
They noted that rates of proficient
scores were not statistically different
between program participants and
the school as a whole. Program students
demonstrated strong growth
in reading on a separate test.
In 2013 surveys, 64 percent of McCarver's
teachers agreed or strongly
agreed that the program is helping
to identify the nonacademic needs
of students, but just 27 percent of
those teachers said the program was
helping to meet those needs.
The program's leaders have
worked to find the right level of
supports for families, one that addresses
their most challenging
needs but is also financially sustainable
and scalable, said Michael
Mirra, the executive director of the
Tacoma Housing Authority.
"Children who grow up in deep
poverty or homelessness bring
challenges to the schoolhouse door
that the best-trained teacher in the
fanciest classroom cannot address
alone," he said.
Caseworkers have helped the
Gantt family sign up for utilities assistance,
find charities distributing
free toys at Christmas, and identify
financial aid for college. They also
gave the family baskets of food at
Thanksgiving and took them on a
day trip to the Seattle Art Museum.
Caseworkers have helped connect
other participant families to mentalPhotos
by Ian C. Bates
http://www.edweek.org/fullframe http://www.edweek.org/fullframe http://www.edweek.org/fullframe http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - December 10, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - December 10, 2014
